Little Christs

This piece is the first I engineered to be created in layers. Until this piece, my designs assumed a single sheet of wood carved in one session on the CNC. However, when this design came to me, I knew it wouldn’t be possible in one pass, and so I expanded my process. To create Little Christs, I scribe 10 sheets of 1/8″ wood, paint each following the scribe marks, carve each, clean each, assemble and glue the stack, then lacquer.

Little Christs is built around the two possible regular octagrams (8-pointed stars), representing Christ. Nested inside and tucked around, the pattern is repeated fractal-like giving 10 layers and various sizes of the main Christ pattern. We are those Little Christs, both becoming the body of Christ and becoming like Christ.

The title comes from C. S. Lewis who said, “Now the whole offer which Christianity makes is this: that we can, if we let God have His way, come to share in the life of Christ. … Every Christian is to become a little Christ. The whole purpose of becoming a Christian is simply nothing else.”